Adventures of an Aviatrix, in which a pilot travels the skies and the treacherous career path of Canadian commercial aviation, gaining knowledge and experience without losing her step, her licence, or her sense of humour.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Injury or Death

I made someone stop and turn around so I could get a photo of this sign. I suppose there might be people who grew up on flat land with one storey underground buildings and never watched TV (or only watched Road Runner cartoons?), read books or were otherwise exposed to this concept, but wow. Does our gene pool need humans who don't equate falling over cliffs with serious injury or death?

14 comments:

Whilst teaching young wannabe pilots, I have grown to expect very little from the gene pool these days...

However, I suspect this sign is the result of an overactive "risk management" department - spurred on by our litigious society.

I am reminded of a county/state sign along a beach boardwalk nearby. The shifting dunes have created a 1" lip between adjoining sections. The sign warns you to "Exercise Extreme Caution." Now, maybe if I was climbing along those cliffs... But a 1" lip???

ehhh, I don't know that I blame the agencies. A while beck there was a tourist couple visiting Exit Glacier in ALaska. at the time you could aproch the base of hte glacier. They decided that it would be a good idea to get a picture of the husband posing among the ice chunks that had fallen off apparently without stopping to consider where those ice chunks had come from, nor when there might be some more falling in the same spot. The husband got squashed, and the widow sued the park service because they hadn't warned them about the possibility of ice falling on them.

Seems ridiculous, but I bet every one of those signs has a lawsuit behind it.

Has someone hacked your blog (or blogger)? I always get automatically forwarded to some really stoopid movie rental site after approx. three seconds. Annoying as h'll when I come here to read some great stories.

Additional info on the auto-forward: It appears that I first get forwarded to youtube (via the embedded videos in your previous post?) and then onward to the movieweb site.

This happens only on my old Apple Notebook which has Linux and no Flash Player (because the Flash Player is not available for Linux on PowerPC hardware). On my regular box (Win 98 with a current version of the Flash Player), everything is fine.

I can only guess that youtube probably does some sort of stupid forwarding when they detect a connection by a computer that does not have the Flash Player required to watch their movies.

So it's probably no hacking and not your fault, but some stupid stuff youtube does via the embedded vidoes.

Sorry to chime in once again on the weird forwarding issue: It seems that the two embedded videos in your previous post come from two different sources. One from youtube (which does not do any strange things) and one from movieweb (which seems to make reading your blog almost impossible on certain combinations of operating systems and hardware).

So I have come to the conclusion to not blame youtube but to feel a certain aggression against movieweb.

Likely, yes. But I doubt that the folks who put up the signs are thinking in terms of broader effects on society. Besides, if the stupid people lawsuits are now happening at the volcanoes, and your area of jurisdiction only has cliffs, then from a narrow perspective, putting up the sign at your cliff was a success.

The cliffs in question were the lip of a crater that remained of a volcano. I just said volcano to mix it up a bit. What I meant by back a step was not that the idiots stepped off to some other obvious hazard, but that whether the sign is there to prevent idiots from falling off cliffs or the sign is there to prevent idiots who fall off cliffs from suing, the implication still stands that there are people idiotic enough to need to be told not to fall off cliffs.

But I suppose the ones being dissuaded from suing might know falling off cliffs was dangerous and fall off anyway.

I love that the US government spends so much effort protecting these wild places from idiots, so I suppose I shouldn't begrudge a bit of the vice versa. Anyone who hasn't visited US national parks is missing out. The admission fees are just a token amount and they have excellent park staff. I never visit one without thinking, "I should come back here some time!"

If I had spent the past year cycling through the United States and visiting national parks I would have learned and accomplished as much as I have trying to become an airline pilot. My thanks to all the presidents who have protected these parks.

Thanks for the nice writing about the National Parks, I couldn't agree more.

Concerning the off-topic issue of the MovieWeb redirection: Thanks not only for the frequent and fun read that your blog provides, thanks also for maintaining it in a way that makes it readable for a broad audience. I can't say how much I appreciate websites (or blogs, as a subset of 'websites') that don't make people throw away odd hardware. Yes, the redirection is gone (so it definitely was the embedded MovieWeb thing), and yes, websites that just work to good standards are awesome. Just like the things you said a while back about how nicely (most) VOR and radio communication technology plays nicely with equipment built decades ago and very modern stuff alike. Isn't it fun to have DC3s, 777s and A380s share the same sky? Isn't it fun to imagine that an A380 could easily pick up the signal of an old, mechanically rotating VOR antenna?

In my region of the world, we recently had a case of a man rolling down from the crater rim of Mt. St. Helens. He rolled his snowmobile (too lazy or drunk for the hike) all the way down into the crater and, alas, survived, reportedly with all of his genetic transmission equipment intact. But, hey, there was no SIGN at all on the crater rim!